Liberal Peace: Selected Essays

By Michael W. Doyle

Liberal Peace: Selected Essays, a collection due out soon, brings together some of Professor Michael W. Doyle’s most influential articles on international relations, including his seminal work on why liberal states will engage in wars against their non-liberal counterparts, but not against one another.

The collection, which includes new introducing and concluding essays, spans nearly two decades of Doyle’s scholarship, beginning with his groundbreaking two-part essay “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” which was first published in 1983. In that essay, Doyle offers an explanation for the protracted peace between liberal democracies based on ideas posited by Immanuel Kant almost 200 years earlier, namely that representative states are hesitant to engage in wars that their publics do not accept, respect the universal human rights that other representative governments reflect, and are tied together by economic interdependence.

“No one of these constitutional, international or cosmopolitan sources is alone sufficient, but together (and only where together) they plausibly connect the characteristics of liberal polities and economies with sustained liberal peace,” Doyle argues in that essay.

The new collection also includes Doyle’s examination of the use of force in international security policy, offering a critical analysis of the “transformative” interventions in the Middle East undertaken by the administration of President George W. Bush.